It’s seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Instead of putting silicone implants into your breasts, just get fat injections to the breast and liposuction in the process! It makes sense to enlarge the breasts with similar tissue to what’s already in the breasts. If the breasts are made up of fibrous tissue, milk producing tissue and fat, just add fat! Not so fast. There’s a reason everyone isn’t doing it.
What’s wrong with fat injections to the breast?
There’s nothing really wrong with injecting fat into the breasts but it has drawbacks. Most patients considering breast augmentation want a very augmented, full-breasted look, especially in the upper portions of the breast. This is best accomplished with silicone implants. While fat can be injected into the breast, it doesn’t result in the upper breast, or upper pole fullness, that patients want.
However, fat injections are great for correcting breast asymmetry after breast cancer. For example, in the video below, the patient had a lump of tissue removed from the right breast after a diagnosis of breast cancer. This resulted in her right breast being smaller than the left. It also left a divot or contour deformity in the right breast. Silicone implants can’t fill in a specific focal area of missing breast tissue, but fat can. Fat can be a great tool for improving breast symmetry after previous surgery.
Things you should know
Keep in mind that some fat will die after injections into the breast or buttocks. After injecting fat, the hope is that nearby blood vessels will grow into the fat to keep it alive. When this doesn’t happen, fat dies and is reabsorbed into the body. That means that how much fat you inject doesn’t stay there forever. So fat is not as dependable as a silicone implant in this scenario.
You should also know that fat can affect the appearance of your breasts on a mammogram. Mammograms are a type of X-ray that can see suspicious areas of possible breast cancer in breast tissue. Cancer looks like white specs on mammogram. When you inject fat into the breast and some fat dies, that also appears white. So are the white specs cancer or dead fat? Luckily, with newer digital mammography, you can tell the difference. Cancer looks like small white specs and dead fat looks more like popcorn. So even though they are readily distinguishable, it’s important to know that fat injections can affect the appearance of mammograms.
To check pricing on fat injections to the breast to improve symmetry, click here.
Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Jonathan Kaplan for BuildMyBod.
